Tuesday, 22 September 2015

Midpointness Day 7

Day 7

Midpointness

Its been a long day. I've been drawing texts on walls and falling under spells. (Thank you Kate Southworth, your work is beautiful and profound).

I'm going to hand this one over to my friends who are critical in the development of the project and thinking.

Firstly to Andrew for this. I appreciate it enormously. I hope you are OK.

" I am not sure if this
is telepathy, but yesterday I was thinking of the project and wondering about
how things will spring from theory to practice for the show, when stuff/material
is involved.

I want to be in front
of the Vermeer! Surely there is no better tonic?

So pleased the blog
entries are proving so useful, they will be excellent for a spring board in UK
as well as for the show at Lock Up. They should go in the publication.

I made chutney
yesterday for the first time, while you are doing all this, I see both as
achievements, though maybe a little of the hare and tortoise in terms of long
term mindsets.

As my brain is not
working properly, i have decided to pick a book at random off the shelf and
open a page a random and find something on the page that links it to
Midpointness, I offer this to you....

Nothing, this spume, Virgin Verse – The White care of canvas

"Like Nauman,
Marcel Broodthaers can be mistaken for a conceptual artist, antagonistic to the
medium. His works have mimicked installation, as they mount imitations of
museum galleries holding showcases filled with precious objects. With its
concern for the history and medium of painting, his little film L’analyse
d’un tableau (1973-74) overturns this idea of Broodthaers as a
conceptualist. Structured as the pages of a book, slowly turned, the film
begins with a nineteenth-century seascape through which a schooner sails on
turbulent waters. The pages thus recall a history of art, beginning with
Manet’s marine paintings and moving towards the impressionist concern with
sailing. Cutting to close-ups of the boat, this history makes a great leap
forward into modernism when the weave of the white canvas fills the screen like
a triumphant, abstract monochrome. We cannot miss this culmination, calling to
mind Stéphane Mallarmé’s toast to the blank page as the support for poetry
itself:

Salut

Nothing, this
spume, virgin verse

Only to point
to the cup;

So afar many
a troupe

We navigate,
O my diverse

Friends, me
now on the poop

You the
sumptuous prow to reap

Lightnings
and seasons perverse;

A fine
ivresse brings me

Fearless of
its very pitch

To bear
upright this salute

Solitude,
reef, star

To whatever
is worth

The white care
of our canvas

(Le blanc
souci de notre toile.)

this toast to
a medium renders Marcel Broodthaers another knight.

Ok so a little
disclaimer. of course I approached the book case and I did pick the book
directly, but i would not say at random as in a second i am sure my mind
rejected lots of books and went for this one, still the page was opened at
random and in my mind (telepathy might be needed here) this correlates or
offers/opens up something for Midpointness.

'Criticality' as I perceive it is precisely in the operations of recognising the limitations of one's thought for one does not learn something new until one unlearns something old, otherwise one is simply adding information rather than rethinking a structure.

It seems to me that within the space of a relatively short period we have been able to move from criticism to critique to criticality - from finding fault, to examining the underlying assumptions that might allow something to appear as a convincing logic, to operating from an uncertain ground which while building on critique wants nevertheless to inhabit culture in a relation other than one of critical analysis; other than one of illuminating flaws, locating elisions, allocating blames.